Meet the Blow It Out Your Ass Guy

About eight years ago, I was recruiting sales managers for a major corporation. These were good jobs with good salaries (low six figures). We were in a mild economic downturn then, so I had an abundance of candidates. I had one candidate who had applied a couple of times, and his resume and cover letter looked great, but he didn’t have the right experience for this particular job. I liked the experience he did have though, so I put his resume aside to keep an eye out for opportunities that might be a better fit.

About 10 days after he’d applied, he emailed me to follow up and inquire as to whether he would be interviewed for the job. I sent him a note back saying that we were looking for someone with X and Y experience, and that while I understood from his resume that he didn’t have that type of background, I was keeping an eye out for other opportunities for him.

About 10 minutes after I clicked “send,” I received the following reply:

Blow it out your ass.

I went back and read my note again, to see if maybe I’d sounded snippy in my haste to respond-nope. I chalked it up to job-search frustration, took him out of my “keep an eye out for other opportunities” pile, and made a note in the database.

About a year later, I saw a post on an HR forum. It was from a corporate recruiter, and she said she had gotten the same reply to a rejection letter. Eight or nine other people had chimed in to say that they’d gotten it as well. We compared notes and, lo and behold, it was the same guy. He had applied to hundreds of jobs (maybe thousands—who knows), and when he got a rejection, he sent the same one-line retort. He became known as the Blow It Out Your Ass Guy in the HR community.

Job hunting can really make you crabby. Try not to let it turn you into THAT guy.

Tales of the Cluefree appear pretty much every Friday. Past stories are here.

7 Responses

Aha! I have always wanted to be top of mind for every recruiter in my city. Finally I have discovered the way! My name will be on the lips of every HR person in the metro! Blow It Out Your Ass Guy is a GENIUS! They’ll all be talking about me for years! Talking about me and how I…

It can’t be fun going through life with that attitude. And, it simply gets you exactly no where. I suppose if this guy gets a kick of out that kind of reply, the good news for him is he’ll keep getting lots of opportunities to do it again.

I saw a candidate response that gave a similar message, but was tons more classy… see: